House budget lacks child care stabilization

Happy Week of the Young Child! The early childhood team has been busy covering the legislature and traveling the state to tell stories of North Carolina’s future: our young children. Katie spent Thursday at a Smart Start celebration in Washington.

Last month’s final Early Bird was written from Morganton, where Katie and I spent two days at Western Piedmont Community College talking to early childhood community college faculty. We asked them two main questions:

• What is the biggest challenge facing the early childhood profession?
• What should state lawmakers know about the early childhood profession?

The professionals who are preparing teachers responded that the profession needs respect, livable wages, education standards, and an infrastructure of support. It needs to be taken seriously, they said, by community college leaders, state and federal policymakers — everyone who cares about young children.

Since then, the state House has released its budget, and advocates told me they were surprised by its lack of investments in early education. There are no compensation grants to continue one-time federal grants that many child care providers used to raise teacher wages. There is no expansion of WAGE$, which provides education-based wage supplements to early childhood teachers, another request from advocates. And there is no subsidy floor, which would give more even funding to child care programs providing care to families through the subsidy program across the state.

“In adding up the new funding over the biennium for the early childhood pieces, it’s $45.8 million in new funding,” said Elaine Zuckerman, advocacy and communications director for NC Early Education Coalition, in an interview with EdNC. “That’s it — which is a really small amount of money given the total amount of the budget and the amount of money they had available to work with this year.”

In an interview with EdNC, Rep. David Willis, R-Union, said he expects compensation grants to be in the conference budget, after negotiations with the Senate. Willis is a co-chair of the early childhood caucus that was pushing for $300 million in grants. Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget included $500 million in grants.

Below, I’ll dive into what did make it in the House budget when it comes to early care and education. And below, don’t miss the release of the Healthy Social Behaviors hotline, a free resource for licensed early childhood educators navigating challenging classroom behaviors.